As President George W. Bush strode toward the mound of Nationals Park earlier this year to throw the inaugural pitch at the newly built Washington, D.C. stadium, the crowd erupted into ... something. Cheers, noisemakers, claps, boos and hoots, clashed with 39,383 other sounds in such a cacophony, it was impossible to discern any main sentiment. Through it all, the president smiled, half-jogged from the dugout, waving and shaking hands of players and coaches before throwing out one heck of a pitch.

This may be the sound of a dying American presidency: this mass of competing noises; a cloudburst of praise and pillory as history considers its verdict of the man who ruled Washington for a time.

As America’s 43rd president leaves office in two months, that racket is destined to fade and George Bush’s legacy will begin the long process of settling to its rightful spot in the presidential pantheon. As of last Thursday, Mr. Bush can no longer issue any “economically significant” rule changes. He can do virtually nothing now to change history’s judgment of his eight years in office, whatever it may be.

The president himself has shrugged off the question: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead,” he once told Bob Woodward.

Never wanting to be a war president, he regrets coming off as belligerent, telling London’s The Times that a refusal to submit to multilateralism and a punchy speaking style (“bring ‘em on”) “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

He appears to repent little else, suggesting time will be kinder to his legacy than contemporaries. “When history marches on,” he told the BBC, “there will be a little more objective look about the totality of this administration.”

He could scarcely allow himself to believe otherwise. “The argument that ‘history will vindicate me’ is all he has left,” says Alexander Moens, author of The Foreign Policy Of George W. Bush.

Dozens of books deriding or parodying the Bush presidency, and newspaper archives stuffed with years of columns and editorials from a generally hostile press, comprise the fossil record through which tomorrow’s historians will reimagine Mr. Bush’s reign.

History may take a cooler view than the political partisans and emotional pundits who graded the president for the last eight years, but measures with a cruder yardstick, favouring highlights over subtleties. There is the “force of narrative” in presidential legacies that is not easily challenged, says Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, a revisionist take on Roosevelt’s economics.

“People like a story, you have the bad man and the good man,” she says. “It’s almost structural. It’s got to be a little bit of a parable.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” Depression elixir retains its charm, she points out, despite evidence it was economically destructive; the onset of war salvaged the U.S. economy, not FDR.

Ronald Reagan is lionized for his first term’s bellicose “Evil Empire” posturing, not the conciliatory and endless negotiations with the Soviets of his second term.

John Kennedy’s martyrdom lends his story an irresistible aura. “Kennedy’s got a great legacy. But what did he ever do? He got killed before he did anything,” suggests David Bercuson, a University of Calgary historian. After Kennedy dragged his heels on civil rights, it was Lyndon Johnson who finally advanced the cause. But “all poor old Johnson gets credit for is the Vietnam War,” which Kennedy set in motion, Prof. Bercuson argues.

While the passage of time can soften a story’s edges, rarely are presidential reputations radically rehabilitated. There are exceptions: Harry Truman, who left office in 1953 in disgrace is now ranked among the top American presidents of all time, his unpopular Soviet containment strategy and civil rights moves admired in hindsight. Warren G. Harding, venerated upon his death in office, is today considered one of America’s worst presidents.

The future may nod to some of Mr. Bush’s achievements, but the loser label will be difficult to shake, says Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia politics professor and author of The Sixth Year Itch: The Rise and Fall of the George W. Bush Presidency.

Consider Richard Nixon: “History has taken greater note of détente and opening China and even some of the ways he ended the Vietnam War, but nothing is ever going to shift history away from the White House tapes and the plumbers and the abrogation of constitutional rights and all the pieces of Watergate,” he says. “Some things cannot be changed.”

Like the current president, Nixon left office a figure of malevolence and mockery.

Mr. Bush has the added bad luck of being followed by probably the most vaunted presidential elect ever.

His legacy hardly stands a chance.

Not that researchers would necessarily be eager to salvage the reputation of the conservative Bush. While history may have once been written by the victors; it is more commonly written now by registered Democrats at American colleges, says Prof. Sabato; since 1948, America’s authoritative ranking for presidents has been written by the liberal Schlesinger family.

Mr. Bush’s legacy in the academy is not off to a propitious start: Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz, one of the country’s leading historians, speculated a couple years ago that Mr. Bush could be the “worst president in all of American history.” In an unscientific poll earlier this year of 109 historians by the History News Network, 98.2% rated the Bush presidency a failure; 61% called it the worst ever.

Their case is well known: The 2003 invasion of Iraq, seen now as unnecessary, the bloody and costly occupation in three subsequent years perceived as a tragic waste; wartime transgressions such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay made especially intolerable by the original sin. The circus that was the response to Hurricane Katrina fed the storyline of an inept and distant White House. The current economic calamity fits too, and so it sticks to Mr. Bush, even if he bears as much, or arguably less, responsibility as others.

“He will wear this recession, rightly or wrongly, the same way [Herbert] Hoover wore the Depression and the great crash,” says Prof. Bercuson.

Of course, these are not the only products of Mr. Bush’s eight years in office, but they are the most visible.

Typically overlooked are achievements not fitting the caricature of the incompetent. Mr. Bush reshaped the American judiciary, restoring a constitutional orthodoxy. His ‘No Child Left Behind’ program was the first initiative to effectively shrink the educational gap between minority students and whites. His administration tackled the AIDS epidemic with more energy than any other government, raising spending from $200 million to $6 billion worldwide, providing antiviral drugs for 2 million African patients and care for 3 million imperilled children (Bob Geldof, the nagging conscious of African suffering, said Bush “has done more than any other president” for the region). The president’s Medicare policy gives 10 million low-income seniors free or nearly free prescriptions. He dodged a morale-sinking recession after the worst-ever attacks on America’s soil and psyche on September 11, 2001 and lowered taxes and unemployment to astonishing levels. And Mr. Bush’s zealous globalization of the “War on Terror” almost surely prevented more attacks like 9/11, including a transatlantic airline-bombing plot targetting Canada.

“There is evidence: things were stopped, plots were disrupted and [dangerous] people were killed that indicate that other attacks were in the making,” says Prof. Moens.

The president’s decision to stay the course in Iraq, despite near-unanimous calls to the contrary, was a landmark moment of presidential leadership, he believes. “His ability to actually stay convinced that Iraq had to be won, when nobody else in the world agreed with him, that, I think is an aspect of his strong leadership that people will respect more over time.”

But even the president has himself said he believes his legacy will hinge almost exclusively on the war on terror “and how Iraq fits into that.” Certainly there are signs of immense progress for both: the war in Iraq appears effectively over and Al-Qaeda moribund. Significant though those achievements may be, they will likely not undo the already firmly set narrative of Mr. Bush as failure.

“The evaluation [of the Iraqi invasion] is so negative and so critical right now, it’s hard to see it turning around,” Prof. Sabato says. Nor can a war as ambiguous as one on terror ever provide a clear, gratifying ending. “It’s very unlikely there will be a decisive point [of conclusion]; we don’t even know what we’re looking for,” says Prof. Moens, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University. “It’s hard to know whether you’ve won it.”

The Roosevelt/Truman administration had the triumphant climax of V-Day to quiet human rights questions around internment camps, A-bombs, and refused refugees.

No pageant for Bush may be able to counterweight his lesser sins of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Should Iraq become one day a stable ally in the Mideast’s nursery of tyrants, Americans can credit Mr. Bush, while continuing to question the price paid, Mr. Moens says, Should a more progressive Middle East emerge, it might trace its genesis to Operation Iraqi Freedom. But decades of gradual changes and a thousand more future inputs to the process are guaranteed to obscure that seminal role, Prof. Bercuson says: Really, he points out, who thinks of Gen. Douglas MacArthur anymore when considering the prosperity and democratic stability of Asia’s tigers?

That Mr. Bush’s not unimportant feats should be buried by his failures, while predecessors get their blemishes erased, might seem unfair. But presidential legacies, like presidential reigns, are more subject to politics and perceptions, than fairness.

Ms. Shlaes points out that FDR shrewdly created lasting constituencies—farmers, unions, artists and intellectuals—by exploiting domestic “interest group politics,” groups that long kept his memory warm.

African orphans and Iraqis and Afghanis freed from tyranny have remarkably few champions in the places where history is written. Higher literacy for Black and Hispanic children is no match for the vocal unions that opposed school accountability reforms. History cannot appreciate terrorist attacks that never happened. And who outside the State Department noticed or cared that America’s reputation in Asia soared to new highs under Bush?

Like Nixon, this president’s many enemies will work to ensure their boos echo louder and longer than any scattered applause. Assessing his own legacy, George W. Bush has implied on a few occasions he shall be remembered as a leader who turned the course of history toward greater freedom.

“The work we’re doing takes patience,” he said in an interview early this year. “But most importantly, it takes faith in the universality of freedom that exists in every heart. As so, yes, I’m not only happy to defend decisions, I’m confident they will lead to a better tomorrow.”

It’s lucky for Mr. Bush that he is able to find some solace in that. For, fairly or not, his legacy likely won’t.

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